RD: Tikka to Ride
Overview While attempting to travel back in time to stock up on Indian food, Lister accidentally prevents the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Summary During the previous episode of Red Dwarf, the future selves of Rimmer, Kryten, Lister and The Cat killed the present versions and destroyed the time drive. This however has the affect of erasing the evil, future Dwarfers from existence, and since the future selves were erased from existance the present day one had no one to kill them. In the temporal chaos and reordering that followed a few things changed, such as expanding the cargo deck of Starbug amoung other areas. The ship is now larger, with many more personal quarters and other new rooms. This could be explained by a possible merger between elements of the much upgraded future Starbug with the present Starbug, but on the outside the ship appears unchanged. Lister broke three video cameras in one week trying to explain the events of the past while to the cameras. In the process of this temporal reordering however, all the supplies of the new B Deck (manly curries, pompadoms and lager) were obliterated. In order to gain a curry and his other favourite foods, Lister removes Kryten's guilt and behaviour chips with assistance of one of his spare heads and goes back in time, with the planned course taking them to a Indian restaurant behind the J.M.C. building in London during Lister's original era (the temporal anomalies apparently merging the future time drive's ability to move through space as well as time). Because Kryten's spare head doesn't know how to properly operate the time drive, instead they are brought to Dallas, Texas on the 22nd of November, 1963. Accidentally, they stop the assassination of the current United States President John F. Kennedy by knocking his assassin Lee Harvey Oswald off a 5th floor window of the Texas Book Repository. The consequences of this was that in 1964, John F. Kennedy was impeached when his legendary womanizing is discovered, resulting in the biggest scandal in that version of American history. He is sentenced to an open prison in July 1965, resulting the mafia controlling the U.S. via their puppet president J. Edgar Hoover, blackmailing him with a picture of him in a transvestite orgy. The Soviets are able to successful install a nuclear base in Cuba, resulting in all major southern U.S. cities being fled from, by November 22 1966. The Dwarfers find this all out when, after using the time drive to escape the police, they arrive in an deserted Dallas. After trying to get back to their own time they find that they are marooned since the Soviets landed on the moon first, due to the U.S. being traumatized by Kennedy's impeachment. Thus the history of human space development changed and thus no equivalant of Starbug was ever built. To fix this, the team realize that they must figure out how to re-assassinate John F. Kennedy! Their first attempt is to get Lee Harvey Oswald to the 6th floor to prevent their earlier selves from knocking him off, but that results in the same effect, but a different cause due to the sixth floor not being a suitable vantage point for the shot. Lister finally gets and idea and uses the time drive to meet Kennedy while he is being imprisoned and, in order to restore his reputation in history, and with some persueding gets him to assassinate himself on the grassy knoll (and create a scenario 'no' crime buff will ever solve). In the extended version, it is revealed that the curry supplies were taken by Lister to prevent them from being destroyed in the flood. After he grabs the food from the past, Rimmer unhooks B Deck and sends it off into space, something the happily gouging Lister does not care about in the slightest. Notes The episode title is clearly a play on the Beatles song "Ticket to Ride". In "Timeslides", Kryten as a poorly recieved joke suggested that they go to Dallas in November 1963 to shout "duck!" while standing on the grassy knowl. Noteworthy Dialogue Interesting, funny or relevant dialogue in the episode. Background Information Any behind the scenes information or any other information that doesn't fit in the other categories. Guest Stars *Michael Shannon as John F. Kennedy *??? as Lee Harvey Oswald References Other articles of things featured in this particular episode Category:Series VII Episodes Category:Episodes